Getting the most from the brush tool

The Brushes palette includes a variety of preset brush tips with different sizes, shapes, and densities. The Brushes palette and tool options bar for the brush tool also include a complex variety of settings that you can use with your selected brush. This flexibility gives you a powerful set of combinations that challenges you to use brushes in imaginative new ways.

One of the useful properties of brushes is that you can select different blending modes and opacity settings as you paint on a single layer. These settings are independent of each other and of any blending modes or opacity settings that you apply to the entire layer.